AWS Landing Zone - Overview

Introduction

Setting up a multi-account AWS environment with robust security, governance, and compliance is crucial for large organizations. AWS Landing Zone provides a solution to help with this setup by offering best practices for organizing and managing your AWS accounts. This post will guide you through features you can use to build and manage your AWS Landing Zone environment effectively.

Overview of AWS Landing Zone

AWS Landing Zone is a solution designed to automate the setup of a secure, multi-account AWS environment. It is based on AWS best practices and ensures consistency, security, and governance across your AWS environment.

• Multi-account setup: Allows you to organize your workloads into separate AWS accounts, ensuring better security and resource management.
• Integration with AWS Organizations: Automates account management and governance using Service Control Policies (SCPs).
• Security and compliance: Pre-configured IAM roles, AWS Config, CloudTrail and GuardDuty for security enforcement.
• Networking setup: Creates a baseline network configuration to support isolation and communication between accounts.
• Centralized logging: Aggregates logs from multiple AWS services into a Log Archive account for compliance and auditing.

Key Components of AWS Landing Zone

Multi-Account Setup

Landing Zone establishes a multi-account AWS structure based on AWS best practices, which helps with workload separation and better resource organization.

Common account types in the setup include:

• Master Account: Manages billing and governance.
• Shared Services Account: Hosts shared infrastructure like networking or logging resources.
• Log Archive Account: Secures all audit and access logs for compliance.
• Security Account: Houses central security tooling and monitoring.

AWS Organizations Integration

AWS Landing Zone integrates with AWS Organizations to automate account creation and management, applying Service Control Policies (SCPs) to enforce governance and security policies across accounts.

Security and Compliance

Landing Zone pre-configures AWS services such as IAM, CloudTrail, Config, and GuardDuty to enforce security and compliance requirements. This setup includes logging, encryption, and access controls by default.

Networking

Landing Zone automates network setup using Amazon VPC, ensuring secure isolation and communication across accounts. Subnets, VPC peering, and other essential networking configurations are pre-configured.

Centralized Logging

To comply with security and auditing requirements, AWS Landing Zone aggregates logs from CloudTrail, Config and other AWS services into a Log Archive Account.

Recommended Starting Set for AWS Landing Zone

If you're starting with a basic AWS Landing Zone setup, the following services should be your initial focus:

1. AWS Organizations for account management.
2. AWS Control Tower for secure account setup and governance.
3. AWS CloudTrail and AWS Config for continuous monitoring and auditing.
4. AWS IAM and AWS SSO for centralized access control.
5. Amazon S3 for centralized log storage.
6. AWS GuardDuty for threat detection.
7. Amazon VPC for network isolation and security.

These services provide a strong foundation for a secure, compliant, and well-governed AWS environment. As your organization's needs evolve, you can scale and integrate additional services.

Benefits of AWS Landing Zone

• Consistency: Ensures a consistent, secure setup across all AWS accounts, reducing the risk of misconfigurations.
• Automation: Automates the creation of AWS accounts, deployment of foundational resources, and enforcement of guardrails.
• Scalability: Designed to scale as your organization grows, allowing for more accounts and users as needed.
• Security: Incorporates AWS security best practices to protect sensitive data and ensure compliance.
• Cost-Effective: By streamlining setup and governance, it saves time and resources during environment setup and maintenance.

Conclusion

If you're looking to establish a secure, scalable, and well-governed multi-account AWS environment, AWS Landing Zone or AWS Control Tower are both excellent solutions. These services help automate the setup of foundational AWS infrastructure, enforce security and compliance policies, and ensure consistency across your organization. By leveraging AWS's powerful suite of services, you can create a robust environment that scales as your organization grows.